New Yawk and N'Orleans

[Jonathan Lighter]

OK, Bill Labov is a whole lot smarter than I am and will remain so permanently. (I've tried my best, but no go.) But that must have been a hell of an influx to turn so many people into "New Yorkers."  Could he be referring to the Federal occupation of the proud Crescent City for three long years during the Late Unpleasantess ?  Even if he isn't, why would tens of thousands of otherwise normal folk emulate the presumably weird "Brooklyn diphthong"  etc. spoken by large numbers of "lower-class" Yankee trash ?

(Of course you mean the far-less-elitist "working-class," but we'll let that go this once :  I have been scolded for this myself, by a Ph.D. in English, having incautiously referred to streetwalkers outside the old Port Authority Bus Terminal as "lower-class." )

Surely a Yankee invasion, at whatever moment in history, could only have nudged tendencies that were (coincidentally ?) strong already.

JL

"Arnold M. Zwicky" <zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU> wrote:
---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: "Arnold M. Zwicky"
Subject: Re: New Yawk and N'Orleans
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

On Sep 15, 2005, at 6:38 AM, Geoff Nathan wrote:

> At 12:00 AM 9/15/2005, you wrote:
>> Very notable similarities between much N.O. and N.Y.C.
>> pronunciation are the parallel "r-dropping" and the relative lack
>> of diphthongization in N.O. compared with much of the Gulf South.
>
> I'm pretty sure Bill Labov doesn't follow this list, but in a
> plenary talk he gave to the International Conference on Historical
> Linguistics this summer at Madison he stated (and I think he had
> some contemporary newspaper research to back him up) that there was
> a large influx of lower class New Yorkers in the nineteenth
> century, and that was the origin of at least part of the phonology
> of New Orleans speech. It was a really good paper about the nature
> of sound change and diffusion. I just looked for it, and it's
> available on his website:...

ah, actual research! great stuff.

my earlier objections were to seizing on a similarity and telling a
story that would make the similiarity not a coincidence; the middle-
school-teachers story was particularly silly.

arnold

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